Economy Briefs: Kodak sells digital imaging patents for $525M

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES - -
Wednesday, December 19, 2012

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Eastman Kodak is selling its digital imaging patents for about $525 million, money the struggling photo pioneer says will help it emerge from bankruptcy protection in the first half of next year.

Apple Inc., Google Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., Research In Motion Ltd., Microsoft Corp., China’s Huawei Technologies, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are among the 12 companies paying to license the 1,100 patents, according to court filings. Patents have become very valuable to digital device makers, who want to protect themselves from intellectual property lawsuits. But Kodak, which has been trying to make the sale happen for more than a year, wound up receiving substantially less money than had been expected.

LOS ANGELES — Google is turning on a “scan and match” service for Google Music users to store copies of their songs online, offering for free what Apple sells for $25 a year.

The service, which was launched Tuesday, saves uploading time for those who want to save their music libraries online. It scans a user’s computer and provides online access to the songs it finds, as long as they match the songs on its servers. Otherwise, it will upload songs to a user’s online locker.

NUCLEAR POWER

Training set for new nuclear plant operators

WAYNESBORO, Ga. — Utility companies are preparing a new wave of workers to run first-of-their-kind nuclear plants, a process certain to influence how workers are trained in the new technology for decades to come.

Southern Co. in Georgia and SCANA Corp. in South Carolina are the first to prepare new workers to run a recently approved reactor design never before built in the United States. Similar training will be repeated over the decades-long lifetime of those plants and at other new ones that may share the technology in years to come.

Both power companies are building pairs of Westinghouse Electric Corp. AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle near Augusta, Ga., and SCANA Corp.’s Summer Nuclear Station northwest of Columbia, S.C.

EARNINGS

FedEx plans to grow by cutting costs

NEW YORK — FedEx may be pessimistic about the U.S. economy, but it’s confident about increasing its earnings.

The world’s second-largest package delivery company, a bellwether for economic health because of the vast number and kinds of shipments it handles, lowered its economic forecast for the U.S., saying there remains a lot of uncertainty for the country.